I’ve payed my subscription for The Times and am now looking at their coverage of the killing of Bin Laden and comparing it to The Guardian.

The Times has gone for a live blog approach, updating events in real time. They include every aspect of the story, Pakistan’s refusal that they had any knowledge, children searching the compound and further statements from the Americans.

The Guardian has written individual, traditional type journalistic pieces.

There are some great graphics on The Times site, I can’t link to them and I don’t want to copy and paste in case I get sued but I can tell where they’ve put a lot of effort in. Above the main story there are four buttons. Article, video, pictures and graphics.

The Times is easier to navigate than the Guardian. The Guardian tend to riddle their text with links which can be disracting.

Moving over to sport and again The Times looks better and is easier to navigate. The page layout is very similar to a print page. There are headlines and columns as you would expect. The Guardian is nearly the same but not as much space given over to the main articles.

The Times doesn’t feel like an overload of information and is not as colourful as The Guardian. This is a good thing as the colourful Guardian will give me a slight head-ache. I think for £2 a week Times is value for money.

You will see my live blogs over the last few posts. The reason I picked this for my individual project is I wanted an intense 90 minutes of online work and I couldn’t figure out coveritlive in the one day session we did. I decided the best way to get to grips with it was to live blog an event.

There are a number of live blogs for games out there. Sky Sports must be the king, they live blog every league game in England on a Saturday. This is done through their fantastic score centre, which is free.

The Daily Mail do a good effort and include some match pictures, though these are added afterwards.

They each have very different styles, Sky do short posts every minute or two whereas The Mail will have longer posts but every three to four minutes.

My first attempt was the Liverpool V United game. I’ve left this up in its original form to show the mistakes I was making. Firstly the spelling, I am not a very good typist, so there are lots of ‘teh’ when I meant ‘the’. Another problem was the foreign names; Kyriakos, Hernandez etc. are a bit difficult to type when you are trying to watch the action.

My second attempt was the United V Marseilles game. What I’d learned from my first attempt was not to try to include every single kick of the ball. This is where I would have liked an extra person to do my links and I could concentrate on the game, get it more like The Mail model I liked. I spent a bit more time getting to know coveritlive and you can see how I have interactive games. I concentrated a bit more on build up, getting the team sheets up. also I began to add links, such as odds from book makers.

For the main event I chose the Wales V England game. I was lucky this game happened when it did, I know all the players and am familiar with their names (the Welsh defender does spell his name Morison, I know it looks wrong but I assure you that’s how it’s spelt). I spent the day before getting a few links ready: Gareth Bale being injured, war of words between Bellamy and Terry. Jim reckons that professional live blogs have two people working them, one to type and one to find the links, twitter feeds etc. I could have done with somebody but did get very lucky to stumble upon someone (@tombrown21) inside the ground tweeting great stuff about the game and the atmosphere.

The game was the intense 90 minutes as expected but the work I’d done the day before and my two dry runs at live blogging really helped. My biggest downfall was my typing speed. There are other elements I would ike to improve. I thought some of the images I used for the likes of substitutions were a bit big. I would have preferred a little graphic in the side of the text but coveritlive doesn’t do this.

To sum up, my biggest downfall, without question, was my typing speed but being able to go back over it and tidy up helps. Does it work? Liverpool V United, no way. Wales V England, I like to think so. Looking at them now it is like they are written by two different people. Having the Mail and Sky to compare my work to really helped but if I wanted to improve it I would draft in a second person and that would allow me to do the longer posts which I think work better for anybody reading the blog.

Finally it’s not all sport this live live blogging lark, It can work in the world of politics as well.

NEWS DAY

At the end of the year we had to do two news days. On the first of these days I worked on a story about a party being thrown in Queensbury for the cricket world cup final. The story was for the WNOL site. This involved using the interview techniques we worked on I first year. It was a reasonably easy interview to do as my interviewee gat to advertise his restaurant and was quite willing to talk. The rest or the day was online subbing, again first year skills.

For the second day I was involved in the social media aspect of the online journalism. I was able to take advantage of this as I had to do a lot of work with the radio team. I read the sports report for them and got involved in a debate about Wayne Rooney being suspended for swearing. I was able to go in between rooms updating the Twitter feed about the weekend’s sports. I put up highlights of the football that was coming up; there was also one of the majors in the golf going on out in America.

I worked with Matt in finding updates for his blog. I kept him informed of what I was doing and what was coming up in the radio broadcasts. Working directly with the radio team on the second day gave me more to do with the social media team. The cross media aspect is important and when the two teams talk to each other it gives a better overall final product.